A masterstroke from Ravi Shastri had changed Rohit Sharma’s Test career as the stylish right-hander transformed from being a “bored” middle-order batter to an exciting opener in the longest format.
“Batting at four, five, this guy (Rohit) used to get bored. Then I started dwelling on the fact, ‘why is he so successful in one-day cricket?’ He likes to be out there early. I said, ‘if he can go out there and do it, he has got enough time on his hands to play the quicks. He’s got the shots against the quicks, to take them on. The field is up, so Test cricket might be a honeymoon for him if he starts embracing it’,” Shastri said in the ICC Review.
The incident is from 2019, the year when Rohit smashed five centuries opening the innings in the ODI World Cup. Shastri became India’s head coach in 2017.
Rohit recently called time on his Test career, which saw him play 67 games and score 4,301 runs, including 12 centuries.
“He’d batted enough at five and six and he wasn’t here and he wasn’t there. He would get his 20s or 30s and throw it away. (I thought) let’s put him under pressure and send him up (the order). And I remember telling him in the West Indies, ‘we want you to open’.
“This was (August) 2019, if I’m not mistaken, after that World Cup. He’d had a great World Cup, so his form was very good. And he might have thought of it for a little while, but he was okay.
“Then he came in for the first Test match and he opened the innings and he got a hundred. If I’m not mistaken, he got a big 100 in that first innings and then he didn’t look back because then he seemed to enjoy it,” added Shastri.
Nine of Rohit’s 12 Test hundreds came after he started opening the innings.